Jeeps

What We Talk About When We Talk About Cars

It was always an exciting moment when my dad got home from work. He was a car salesman for much of my early childhood, working at a series of dealerships for different brands. Most of the time he would come home from work in the car he left in—our late-‘70s model yellow Toyota Celica, the orange Chevy Nova, or one of the many forgettable older sedans that we cycled through for a while. But sometimes, he would come home in a demonstrator vehicle. I don’t really know the process by which he got the chance to drive one of these. It only happened every so often, but the cars tended to be newer or more interesting models, so maybe the dealerships were trying to get vehicles in the public eye, in the days before internet marketing made it easy to target customers. Once he came home in a Pontiac Trans Am, and I helped him take the T-top off in the driveway. Other times he would arrive in a Buick—which in those days represented a kind of luxury we could never afford to buy new. But my favorite days, he would come home in a Jeep.

People often ask me where I found my love of Jeeps. This is the answer. I don’t remember which years, but for a while my dad worked at a Jeep and Eagle dealership. He must have worked there in the mid-to-late ‘80s, because once he came home driving a Grand Wagoneer, which in that time was nearing the end of a long production run. It was huge, lumbering, and very expensive. It had a CB radio installed right on the floor beside the place where the driver sat, something I had never seen before. Another time, he arrived in a Jeep Cherokee, one of the first SUVs that was targeted toward middle-class families. We took it to a nearby dirt road to try out the 4-wheel drive’s low range. He never came home in a CJ or a YJ as far as I can remember, but I learned all about those predecessors to today’s Wranglers through the accessory catalogs he would carry home from work. The knobby tires and lift kits always caught my attention; I remember peppering him with questions about how traction worked, and how steep of a hill you could really go up if you had a Jeep and the right tires.

One day our family bought a Jeep Cherokee—a baby blue one that was nicer than any other car we ever owned. We bought it new, I presume with an employee discount of some kind, and it’s the car I learned to drive in. I drove it to the Senior Prom (because my first car was so wretched, but that’s a post for another day). When during my senior year I needed to make the 6-hour round trip to the college I would be attending, the Jeep was the car I took. When a blizzard hit in 1993 and everything was shut down for weeks, the Jeep was how we made it out to get to the grocery store and pick up relatives and friends who were stuck at home with no power or heat. That blue Jeep Cherokee is still, in my imagination, something like the Platonic ideal of a vehicle.

I had another Cherokee just like it when I was in graduate school—it was baby blue and boxy, a couple of years newer, but this time purchased with 180,000 miles already on it. It was one of many Jeeps I have owned. I’ve owned two Cherokees, a Comanche pickup truck (which I drove back and forth to my job at Olive Garden in college, after my girlfriend—now my wife—taught me to drive its 3-speed stickshift transmission in the college chapel parking lot), a Patriot and a Commander (two forgettable models from the late-2000s), and of course, a series of Wranglers. I’ve had a 2-door yellow TJ from 2000, a black 4-door JK 2007, and a silver 2013 JK. My current vehicle is a 2016 4-door JK in gray; it has been around long enough that the kids have started arguing over who will inherit it.

Maybe you’re wondering about the purpose of this recitation of automotive history. Who cares what cars I drove in graduate school, or how my dad came home from work? Maybe nobody does. But I’m writing about it because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about cars, maybe even more than usual, and thinking about my own relationship with them. This has taken a few different forms, all of them orbiting around the questions of identity and values. After all, cars are rarely neutral appliances, especially in America. They are avatars of the self; they say something about who we are, who we aspire to be, or who we want people to think we are. Even if you drive the most nondescript econobox, that’s a statement you’re making to the world.

For most of my adult life, my statement has been made in a Jeep. It’s so much a part of who I am that people regularly ask me that question from the second paragraph—what is it with you and Jeeps? I have some answers to that; my dad is an important part of it, for sure, but I also love the feeling of taking the top and doors off and feeling the air around me, and I love to bash through two or three feet of snow past all the stuck Subarus and Rav4s. I love driving a stickshift, and Jeeps are some of the only vehicles still widely available with one. There are a lot of aspects to it, all tangled up in my sense of self; Jeeps are just kind of my thing.

But as long as I have driven Jeeps, I have known that I probably shouldn’t be driving them. When I bought that baby blue Cherokee with 180,000 miles in grad school, I justified its poor fuel economy because we frequently took road trips through the snowy roads along the North Carolina and Tennessee border, and the 4 wheel drive came in handy. Al Gore hadn’t released his film yet, and while all the liberals like me understood that climate change was real, it didn’t yet feel like a crisis we were already living through. I knew that driving an SUV was irresponsible, but those were the days of Hummers and Excursions, comically enormous vehicles that made my Jeep Cherokee look small and fuel-efficient by comparison. Every model redesign since has brought improvements in fuel economy, giving me a fig leaf to cover up with, but my current JK still only gets about 23 or 24 mpg on the highway with the AC off and a light touch on the throttle. (I once had a mechanic at the Jeep dealer tell me that the way I drove, in the highest gear I could manage without stalling, was “never how we would do it” at the dealership).

But it’s not all about fuel economy and climate change. Over the years I have also felt a widening gap between my reasons for driving Jeeps and the reasons other Jeep drivers drive them. Jeeps have always tapped into a certain vision of America and what it means to be American. Notice the names of the models I’ve owned in that paragraph above. Cherokee and Comanche? Who decided that it was a good idea to name cars after Native American tribes? Patriot and Commander? A strange undercurrent of patriotism and militarism, flowing from Jeep’s origins as combat vehicles in WWII, runs through the whole thing. I’ve always been a little uneasy with the rah-rah nature of Jeep’s marketing and market positioning. Every time Jeep launches a Super Bowl commercial selling crossovers with patriotism, I cringe a little bit.

But in recent years, it has become acute. I live in Colorado, a solidly blue state, and I live in a city, Denver, that often runs 70-75% Democratic in elections. Even still, many of the Jeeps I see (and I see a lot) have begun sporting all the paraphernalia of the far right. There are lots of those “Don’t Tread On Me” flags, “Hillary for Prison” stickers, and AR-15 decals. Lately, the cool thing seems to be skulls—weird elongated and stylized skulls that I suppose are meant to suggest fearlessness and bravado, but which also echo the iconography of far-right movements and the insignia of literal Nazis in WWII. I see Jeeps that are plastered with every pseudo-survivalist accessory—external fuel and water tanks, far more lights than are really useful, recovery skids and shovels. Jeep owners look they’re preparing for WWIII—which, maybe they are.

It’s not that I have a problem with conservative people; I grew up in a very conservative area, and I get along fine with a lot of conservative family and friends. I have no issue talking to people whose politics are pretty far away from mine. But it’s hard to abide the insurrectionist, pandemic-denying, alt-right crowd, and that’s the crowd that seems to have taken over Jeeps lately. Sometimes I go on the Jeep message boards, which are an important source of knowledge and advice for when something goes wrong. They’re filled with people angling for a fight or proudly declaring, in their account signatures, that they intend to “Stop The Steal” or “Make America Great Again, Again.” It’s hard to escape the feeling that these are not my people.

I had a glimmer of hope the other day, when Jeep announced two of its four initial all-electric models. The Jeep Recon in particular caught my eye. It’s not a Wrangler or a Wrangler replacement, but it is a 4-door, 5-seat SUV with removable top and doors, real off-road capabilities, and an all-electric drivetrain. It doesn’t have a stickshift (which are useless in an electric car anyway), but besides that, it’s perfect. It comes out in two years, but I’m already mulling over whether to put down a deposit to get my name on the waiting list.

Scrolling through the comments on the announcement photos on Instagram, though, it was full of Jeep fans. Some proudly and angrily said that they’d drive internal combustion engines forever, even if the government tried to ban them. Others commented with the puking emoji. Many said that the all-electric Jeep was a sign that the company had given in to the liberals and their climate hoax. It was the beginning of the end, they all assured each other. It felt like the beginning of the end for me, too. How could I continue to share something in common with these people who were so willfully ignorant? How had something like an electric car become such an avatar for everything they thought was wrong, and everything I thought was right?

Cars are never just cars, at least not in America. They say something, whether you want them to or not. My Jeep has begun to say something about me that I’m really not comfortable with, but I’m not sure yet what I will do about it, if anything. I don’t want to let them take it from me, but I also don’t want to kill the planet with my fuel consumption habits. For now I’ll keep driving my gas-guzzling Jeep, throwing up the famous “Jeep Wave” at people I probably disagree with profoundly, and thinking about whether to put my name on the list for one of those electric models that will arrive in a few years (on the prayer that I will be able to afford it by then—I certainly can’t afford an electric car now). It’s not such a big deal, in the grand scheme of things—what kind of car I drive, and what kinds of people also drive that car. It's not important. But it’s a neat encapsulation of bigger questions that many of us wrestle with these days: questions about how to be American in a time when insurrectionists try to claim American-ness, how to be a citizen of this time while also being responsible to the next generations, how to enjoy what you enjoy while also not being a problematic person. As they say, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, meaning that whatever consumer choices we make, they will always be troublesome. I think that’s true, but we should still do the best we can.

Someday when my kids remember me coming home from work, they will remember me coming home in a Jeep. I don’t know what that will mean to them then, or even what it will mean to me. We all inherit things from the past, but the inheritance can be unpredictable and unreliable. We can’t always say now what anything will sound like later, or understand now how something will look then. Maybe someday we will all look back and wonder, in shame, how we could ever drive something that burned gasoline at 20 miles to the gallon. Perhaps will wonder why we felt at ease to burn away our world. It might be that we hardly remember it at all, the smell of gasoline and motor oil. Or, it could be that all we think about is the memory of an open road.